Occasionally some journalism will pop randomly across my screen and give me a jolting reminder that I have not always been the person I am today, that my opinions about many critical life-altering matters has changed, and today that story is Whose Red Lips Ruled The Emmies? (Heidi Klum's, but that's beside the point.) You see, in childhood I idolized characters I saw on Nick At Nite, most specifically Tina Cole, who played Robbie's wife on My Three Sons and is pictured after the jump, and anyway, the point of this is that the show made me want to go back in time so I could 1. have sex with Robbie, not that I knew what sex was at the time, and 2. buy white lipstick like Tina's, because they didn't sell it in the eighties, and the closest substitute was this sparkly CoverGirl stuff called "LipSlicks," which my mom nicknamed "sperm lips."

Anyway, fast forward twenty years and I have come to realize my mom was right: any sort of lipstick that a dude would not describe as "red" or possibly "dark pink" is trashy. Today I not only abhor lipsticks in all variations of "neutral" and "nude," I find myself actually inwardly rooting for celebrities who wear red on their lips. When Alicia Keys and Lauren Conrad both showed up to last weekend's MTV Video Music Awards in impeccably-linered shades of red, a not-insubstantial part of me actually liked them more, perhaps because their full, deliberate, ladylike mouths provided such a welcome contrast to Britney's spermy lipsynching. (OMG did I really just write that sentence?) What's more, I realized I have long harbored a pro-red lipstick policy with celebrities:

Julie Delpy, for instance, can basically do no wrong in my eyes, though Sofia Coppola, who isn't so much a "red-red" type of person as a "muted sheer red and mauve with lipliner" type of person, sort of represents my lipstick ideal:

So how do I justify this? I am still coming up with a sufficiently pretentious, hubristic line of reasoning to defend myself. You can trust that consumerism and the coming recession will come into play. In the meantime, pretty pictures!